A Royal Wedding, disturbing unrest and riots in the inner cities, the distressing rise in unemployment, a British Navy destroyer being deployed off the coast of the Falklands Islands with a Prince in attendance…… 1981-2 or 2011-12?
There have been many strange moments for me in the last three months as I have been trawling through the 1980s material at the Mass Observation (MO) Archive. Partly it’s finding disturbing parallels with events in the present day and partly it’s because I was responsible, with David Pocock, for amassing the material at the time – so it revives many memories of those early days of the new phase of MO.
The Eighties is often represented frivolously as a decade of big hair and bigger shoulder pads but of course it was also the decade of the Thatcher government. For this project, we wanted to go beyond the wry ‘retro’ evocations of the decade and see how a swathe of what might be called ‘ordinary’ people represented their lives at the time. I don’t use the word ‘ordinary’ with any degree of comfort –if you were mad enough to volunteer for MO in 1981, you had to be rather extraordinary. I use it rather to mean those people whose lives might otherwise not be represented in their own words in historical archives or publications. To volunteer as a Mass Observer would have had to enjoy writing, and you would have had to have the time and space to do it regularly. You might even have to think you were a little bit good at it. You needed to be interested in observing the world around you; you needed to be reflective about the times you lived through and you needed not to be afraid of consigning your often very private thoughts to an archive at a university in the south of England where they would be received by an older eccentric professor you didn’t know (David Pocock) and a youngish woman with suspect spelling and feminist orientations (me).
It’s over thirty years ago that the late David Pocock had the idea of starting up a contemporary version of Mass Observation for the 1980s. Could we, he wondered, find people who would be prepared to record their daily lives for us in the way that the original Mass Observation diarists had recorded life during the Second World War. The idea was to run what we called “The Inflation Project” recruiting people from all over the UK to write for us on regular themes. We expected it to last for two or three years perhaps. In practice, apart from one or two lulls, it has now been in operation for over thirty years.
By the end of the 1980s, approximately 2,000 people had been on the mailing list at some time and there were over 1,000 on the mailing list. They responded in depth to “directives” or open-ended questionnaires usually three times a year. It is selections from these writings that we are using for this current digitisation project, together with related printed materials and selections which Jill is making from the oral testimonies at the British Library. Topics covered by MO in the decade included current events, holidays, family, AIDS, drugs (legal and illegal), the home and housework, material objects, time, morality, religion, clothes, disasters, the European Community, Elections and political parties, war, work and unemployment. What is interesting to discover is that 95 of the people who started writing for MO during the 1980s are still writing for MO today.
The selection for the “Observing the 80s” Project has been made from these 95 people for the very pragmatic reason that we easily could reach them to ask for their permission to put their writing on line. They had already given copyright permission for MO to reproduce their writings, but JISC insisted, rightly, that digitisation constituted a re-purposing of the material. Jessica Scantlebury who now manages the MO Project at the Archive, sent out the letters and I am pleased to say that almost everyone has written back with their permission. As a result we are now in the process of selecting 15-20 of these writers whose responses across the decade we can digitise for the new online resource.